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Cooking in the Living Room

Now as you saw yesterday we purchased some reduced sun dried tomatoes and they were very very nice and ……… reminded us just how much we love sun dried tomatoes but…… as a rule they are quite expensive!

£1!!!!!

Now last week we purchased a huge bag of cherry tomatoes for the amazing price of £1! We had used some during last week but still had a large amount left so…… Becksie got thinking and wondered what would happen if she ‘sun dried’ these little fellows!

So ….. she looked outside in the hope of glorious sun but just saw rain, rain and a little sleet (rain and sleet washed tomatoes just don’t sound all that lovely)! Errrrrm back to the drawing board! Then it hit her – if orange peel dries a treat on top of the wood burner perhaps cherry tomatoes would ‘sun dry’ well ‘fire dry’ as well!

I’m so busy in the living room I can’t even open my eyes!

As Lizzie was busy playing in the living room Becksie decided to do the whole event in the living room! So here’s what we did:

Put Cherry Tomatoes on a baking tray – a nine month old is a very helpful assistant to this process!

Cut all the cherry tomatoes in half!

Don’t worry we have cleaned the fireplace today!

Lay them seed side up on the tray!

Sprinkled with a little salt!

Sprinkled with a generous amount of pepper!

Sprinkled with some sugar!

Leave them to dry out on top of the wood burner (tray on top of a trivet) for about 4 hours (this would also work in a low oven)!

When they were dried out we let them cool, then placed in a preserving jar that we filled with olive oil!

Simply delightful! We will most certainly be getting more cherry tomatoes and great news we can simply reuse the oil (which also be lovely in salad dressings)!

The only draw back with this project is resisting the urge (and controlling everyone else in the houses urge) to quality control as you go! Careful observers will notice we finished with considerably less tomatoes than we started with!

Thank you – as long as they are in the fridge they will be fine – the mighty Delia has some recipes for preserving in oil and we have seen quite a few other recipes – any how ours were so tasty they may have already been eaten 🙂